Calligraphy - breath, pressure, line
Shadow of white butterfly
Voices ebb and flow
Fingernails trimmed
Share river
Floating world
Mercenary butterfly shadows
River language
Color zen
Create like a child
Less is more
Dream it
Feel it
Dance it
Live it
Zeynep said, “I am a rose thorn and Winter Hawk. Wings instinct and heart. My razor talon tears meat from bones to feed my creative Hunger Angel.” - (Everything I Posess I Carry With Me)
“I am a cognitive psycho-neurolinguist,” said a gravedigger. “My specialty is languages. Lost tongues. Wandering deep in the Tarim Basin following the Silk Road through Central Asia I discovered the 4,000 year old Tocharian language and Afansievo culture. It was a proto-Indo European language with Celtic and Indian connections established by trade caravans and explorers. I suspect it is Qarasahr or IA based on an Iranian dialect.”
Mircea Eliade, a historian of religions said, “Myths tell what really happened. Myths suggest a reality that cannot be seen and examined. Myth is truth trying to escape from reality. A myth is a story of unknown origins, sacred stories based on fear and belief containing archetypical universal truths. They are in every place and no particular place.”
Marcus Aurelius - "Everything is only for a day, both that which remembers and that which is remembered."
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History became legend.
Legend became myth.
Myth became story.
(What you wanted - Myth - Actuality)
This anthropological fact accompanied Lucky wandering among unfinished construction projects and abandoned manuscripts in China, Turkey, Indonesia, Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos.
He joined millions of emaciated migrant refugees passing shattered bricks, broken hopes and strangling dangling cables connected to nothing in particular.
Shoddy incomplete dust dreams and quick profit schemes thrived where political thugs disguised as beauticians, missionaries and NGO social workers living in penthouses and driving Land Rovers exploited villages stealing land, rivers, mountains, children. Extorting money.
Their rule of law was a truncheon named GREED.
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Sophisticated command and control procedures thrived. Corruption stole millions. Substandard schools pancaked 10,000+ children from one-child families in a Sichuan earthquake.
Garment factories in Dhaka crushed wage slave workers stitching designer labels at a discount.
In May 2014 an inefficient unregulated profit-oriented private coalmine in Soma, Turkey caught fire, exploded, burned and collapsed killing 301 miners.
The angry Teflon Prime Minister (now President) visited the disaster. “This is a fact of life for poor illiterate underpaid miner slaves. It happened in Britain in the 19th century,” he said to widows and families. An angry miner booed him. He slapped the miner. “If you boo the Prime Minister you get slapped.”
His aide, a frustrated soccer player wearing a suit of armor kicked a miner on the ground being held by police. Aide screamed, “Dissent is TERRORISM!”
The ruling AKP Justice and Development party said it was all a mistake: the mine explosion, slap and penalty kick.
Violence, denial and repression are a way of life here, said Zeynep the younger creating a myth.
Dream Sacrifice
Humans dreamed their language acquisition cycle. They desire clarity and kindness with meaning.
Ironic beauty shared languages.
Hot and cold tongues rolled, spitting, parsing, and ejecting sounds from vocal chords forming English.
My 5,000-year-old Mandarin language of emperors and dynasties was filled with peacock thrones, concubines, courtiers, Forbidden City intrigue, conquest and opium warlords’ gesturing life or death with fingered deftness.
Gestures use us.
Mercenary survival skills allowed me to breath, absorbing death free from fear. Free from the small fear.
I am one with the sky.
I trimmed my claws, flaying skin from bones, grinding bones for a potion. I drank from deep unconscious wells. Hearing Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons my animistic archeologist recovered fossils with a brush.
I dreamed the Sun Dance of the Plains people. Nations gathered in late spring celebrating a four-day cycle of rituals and creation dances. Dancers choosing self-torture have their chests pierced by skewers. They hang under the weight of buffalo skulls for twenty-four dances.
Their sacrifice is successful if they have a vision during their trial.
The sun went home to earth.
One vision is all you need.
I spin, dive and dance through inner and outer landscapes. My transparency is automatic. A rock n’ roll manifesto shuttles my kairos through bark, indigo, camphor, jasmine and juniper fire inside nebulous gases of dancing electron particles and energy waves.
Meditating, my head is held by a string. I transfer delicate weight from cloud to cloud, disengaging from the stimulus. Incense rises from flames.
My muse spirit guide joined The Department of Wandering Ghosts. We design mysterious projects. We sharpen rose thorns. I felt sorrow and joy seeing two drops of blood on a finger after brushing a rose thorn. A thorn embedded in my finger flesh dissolved at dawn.
A bird pressed her breast to a thorn to sing.
A beautiful rose creates a sharp thorn.
My thorn is a claw, a sharp definitive talon for tearing meat from white bones. Satisfying my hunger.
I track rabbit’s form blending into underbrush. Floating on evergreen peak winds, I wheel. My eyes see a path you are destined to follow across helter-skelter earth. In, out, in, out, breath flashes fur. I circle above your feeling fleeting form. One eye sees where you’ve been the other knows where you are going past volcanic boulders, through valleys and dry riverbeds where you never sleep. Latent fears harbor your grieving desire. Your shelter search takes on immediacy as your energy adrenaline wanes. Wings fold with forgiveness. I dive. You take evasive action among wild berries. Their sweetness is a faint taste. My sharpness tears you from soil into air.
I rest with death. Claw thorns at your throat.
A drop of blood splatters. Pure red life floats to the surface. A finger smears one drop from skin. Small swift red rivers trickle. Veins release blood volcanoes. Red-hot meteors explode through space.
After Nam I became a regular blood donor.
“Are you allergic to pain?” asked a nurse in a mobile blood unit parked at Sunnyside Beach south of Tacoma.
“Only to pleasure.” A needle slid into a vein drawing A-.
“Writing is easy,” said Hemingway, “just open a vein. The secret is that it is poetry written into prose and it is the hardest thing to do.”
An earnest man discovered right words. Put them in the right order.
Squeezing the plastic handgrip pressure pump at the blood bank I bantered with a mother of five. Blood escaped arms down into plastic tubes out of sight out of mind into clear plastic liter bags with an identification number. Hugs from thank you clown.
I donated blood into sky.
On the shore four young men and a woman stood silent on wet rocks. One man held an earthen urn vase. He handed it to the woman. It was large and awkward. Dust and death are awkward.
Cradling it, she tipped toward water. A river of brown ash flowed over the edge. A fine dust mist dressed liquid. Her dancing arms scattered a dust trail of someone’s life. She handed the urn to a companion. He poured ash into miniature tides.
A bouquet of red, yellow and white roses with freshly cut long green stems flew from the woman’s hand into Puget Sound. The urn was offered to another man. No thanks, shaking his head.
A Vietnam veteran in shadows wearing a faded boonie hat played his weeping guitar. Seven lingering faltering notes ran through sand past an elderly couple staring at seas beyond life’s horizon. A playful father and son threw seaweed at each other. A crow’s shadow landed on a dead tree branch.
My blood flow created a cataclysmic flood. Cold mountain poems melted snow, painted forest trails, seeping to sleeping roots. Meadow petals opened to moisture. Earth lava blood carved canyons. Tributaries branched out from the Tree of Knowledge and Tree of Life.
Blood gouged out rock, cleaning earth, transforming stone to sand, to dust, erasing river bottoms, collapsing banks, overpowering everything in its path, forming new microscopic celestial arrangements.
Fingers painted blood on lips and threads. Luminous light illuminated weavers, diggers and fleischers. Shuttles click clack.
Blood dyed threads loomed stories.
Diggers rattled their blood. Brushes exploded seeds into rain. Laughing bones excavated histories.
A laughing axe split clouds into letters.
Alpha, Beta, Omega.
A thorn allows a ghost to realize a life principle.
Eudaimonia ‘human flourishing’ from the Greek means a good life.
After a year in Mandalay you facilitated English and personal courage at the Lao Friend's Hospital for Children in Luang Prabang, Laos for six months, June-December.
The hospital, a non-profit NGO based in New York, opened in 2015.
All medical equipment and medicines are donated.
Patients are low income Lao and H'mong. Many have traveled a long way in pickup trucks to try and save someone they love. The hospital treats 50-80 children a day.
Malnutrition, thalassemia, fractures, burns, rashes, infections and childhood illness are common.
Treatment, medicine and Out Reach community care is free.
Lao with money go to the Provincial Hospital next door. There, a old man relative pushes an empty wheelchair across a parking lot. Water floats on the surface of the ornate circular broken water fountain. National hammer and sickle flags hang limp. Families camp out under trees on straw mats with bags, bedding, an unplugged fan and bamboo rice baskets. Trash litters the ground.
White clouds dance with forested mountains under a blue sky in a landscape painting.
Eighty local staff at LFHC.
They call you "teacher."
You call staff "teacher."
They are surprised.
No "teacher" calls them "teacher."
You smile. You are the teacher and I am the student.
You are health care professionals. You know your job. You are learning more about your job. You know more about medicine than I do.
You are a team. You are the future of Laos.
I am here to help you. Simple English is good. My English is getting better.
You are responsible for your learning.
You smile.
You speak slowly and clearly. Pro-nun-ci-a-tion. Diction. Articulation. Intonation.
How now brown cow?
Sound by sound.
Language chunks.
"I need help," are three important English words.
Talk, share, learn and teach your partner. If you can teach it you know it.
They are doctors, nurses, lab and X-Ray techs, administration, infection control housekeepers, physical therapists, maintenance, outreach staff, anesthesiologists, and patient intake receptionists.
Together you do general and medical English. You laugh, dance, sing "I love to color," and practice meditation.
I am breathing in. I am breathing out.
Calm, relaxed heart-mind.
Beginners to advanced practice the four skills, speaking, writing, reading and listening. I don't understand a thing please repeat.
They create vocabulary notebooks and mind maps by topics: medical equipment, illnesses, blood basics, body parts, internal organs, bones, muscles, senses, daily activities, home/furniture, adverbs of frequency, prepositions, directions, family, food, sports, free time activities, weather, time, travel, and dreams.
Staff consistency attending English classes is a challenge. Work schedules take priority.
An operating theatre and neonatal unit recently opened. Staff are busy with medical training.
The in-patient department has twenty beds. Emergency has five beds.
Foreign volunteer health care professionals come for two-four weeks. They share their specialist expertise. They return to England, Australia and beyond wild.
The hospital is in a village twenty minutes from town. The College of Science and Health is nearby.
Outside the entrance gate along a dusty road people sell grilled meat, fish, rice, fruits and vegetables to patient's families, staff, and students.
It's a 125cc motorcycle culture.
At LFHC families have lockers for food and personal belongings in a large community area outside reception. There are toilets and showers.
They use a large outdoor kitchen for cooking. They chop kindling and stoke fires for rice. They eat, sleep and talk while their children receive care.
Every Thursday the nutritionist, visa coordinator and head of infection control prepare healthy meals for the families.
Young H'mong mothers nurse babies.
Families watch comedies or nutrition education films on a large plasma screen.
People sleep on benches.
Dogs rummage through trash.
A family sitting on straw mats eats from shared bowls.
A mother holding her infant studies mirrored reflections.
A father supports a pole with an IV drip bag for his son.
Kids play games on a cell phone.
A housekeeper mops a tile floor.
A security guard dozes near pink, yellow and white orchids hanging from bamboo.
A happy girl with a bandaged leg rolls her wheelchair into the sun.
Curious eyes study a smiling stranger passing through.
He came, he helped, he left.
Friends Without A Border. https://fwab.org/
Matter and consciousness.
Mystery is all.
Create. Live w/o fear, shame or humiliation.
Sewing woman. Thread leads needle.
Courage.
Sewing family in the labyrinth. A singing fool sits down. Sat down. In the center of a labyrinth without a center. He sings. Women smile and laugh. After moments he is invisible.
He laughs one says same same Cambodia.
Laughter language speaks.
You may find yourself in another part of the world.
You may find yourself in a beautiful house with a beautiful wife.
You may ask yourself, how did I get here?
What am I doing here?
How did I grow?
I love the chaos.
Kids recite text from a book at the top of their small powerful voices.
Don't ask them the meaning. Read and repeat.
They know the printed word/symbols only.
The rest is silence.
Silence is the loudest noise in the world.
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